Are Promoted Tweets a Good Idea?

Last week, the fine folks at Twitter announced that they were going to be offering a “promoted tweet” service, to give advertisers the opportunity to financially promote tweets that support their business needs.

How is this going to affect you? Well, unless you use the search function on Twitter.com for the terms coffee or Starbucks, you probably won’t see any difference.

For now.

If the tests run well, you can expect to see the promoted tweets in the various twitterclients available, generating revenue to those that can help spread the word.

There are a few concepts that the twitter team has included in this project that are a little bit exciting – relevance and resonance.

Relevance being the fact that you should only see the promoted tweets when you are searching for the purchased keyword(s)

Resonance, as defined by the twitter team is a measure of “multiple indicators of engagement such as Retweets, @replies, re-use of hashtags, avatar clicks, hashtag clicks, in-Tweet link clicks, views after Retweet and more.”

So if anad promoted tweet is not pulling, the resonance score won’t be very high, which will decrease the number of impressions you get. Sounds good so far – we’ll see how it’s rolled out.

The other interesting idea behind the promoted tweets is the level of interaction your audience will have with it. The Starbucks tweet above has over 100 retweets – which is the max retweets that twitter will show – but your audience can retweet, respond, and revise your message. There’s no option currently available on twitter.com to edit retweets, but most of the available twitter clients have this feature. Expect to see a few hijacked ads down the road.

Ads that are off brand, off target, or just “off” are either going to be dropped due to lack of resonance or go viral because of novelty. It’s going to be interesting to see how the twitter community responds to these paid placements.